A Lexington web development firm is betting that the technology that made Pokémon Go such a hit two years ago stands to be the next big thing in the business world.
The firm, Fusioncorp, made good on its hunch last summer when it created a new startup to pursue clients seeking innovative ways to connect with their customers. The new company, called Gamifi, shot out of the blocks almost immediately. Gamifi’s first client was the Louisville-based Muhammad Ali Center, which asked the company to produce — in just a month’s time — an interactive mobile app for the center’s annual humanitarian awards.
“It was a pretty wild few weeks,” said Michael Baer, Fusioncorp’s former president who now serves in the same role at Gamifi. “But we were not going to miss out on that kind of opportunity.”
The app was a success, and the company’s efforts soon opened the door to a host of new projects with brands such as Taylor Made Farm and Visit Detroit, a collaboration between the Detroit Sports Commission and Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Michael Baer, Gamifi's president, at the company's offices on South Broadway in Lexington.
Sophisticated play
Gamifi is named for what Baer calls the “gamification of everyday reality.” Where virtual reality submerges a person into a computer-generated environment, augmented reality — what Gamifi uses — instead overlays a digital world on top of the physical one, much like Pokémon Go accomplished by hiding digital monsters in real-world settings.
One of augmented reality’s main selling points is that it’s a lot of fun, and it offers a number of new ways in which businesses can engage with their customers, Baer said.
He pointed to Gamifi’s recent project with the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, a non-profit that oversees Buffalo, New York’s 850 acres of urban parks. Gamifi built the conservancy an app that allows visitors to hold up their phone and, using the phone’s camera coupled with virtual markers overlaid onto their surroundings, see where the parks are in relation to their location. The app also offers virtual tours and even conjures a 3D tour guide that provided historical information about the various parks. It also gives people incentive to return, offering discounts and coupons after they’ve visited a certain number of parks in the network.
All of the whiz-bang features obscure what may be augmented reality’s chief selling point, however — it allows businesses to collect a wealth of useful information about their customers.
“At the end of the day, there’s one thing that’s more important than everything else —and that’s your data,” Baer said. “Now you have everyone’s name, profile and email address. And [businesses] can get really intelligent with their marketing to these people.”
Game changer
Gamifi, and its parent Fusioncorp, have come a long way from the company’s origins in 2005 when its founder, Daniel Boone, first began creating Flash-based websites for small businesses. The company grew mostly by word-of-mouth publicity, getting a big boost when Boone designed a site for Laura Bell Bundy, a Lexington native who was then starring in the Broadway musical “Legally Blonde.”
With the rise of smart phones and more sophisticated web applications, the company soon found itself pushing into new territory. It brought on Baer in 2012 and Justin Burnette, the company’s chief technology officer, in 2014 to help round out its sales and tech expertise.
The company had collaborated on other data-driven projects, such as the coupon app Xooker, and Baer and Burnette soon brainstormed about how they could build a native app that would allow businesses to create an “immersive tech experience” while also furnishing incentives to keep people coming back to the app. Burnette, the company’s tech wizard, got to work building the back end that would support their ideas and, shortly after, Gamifi was born. The company officially launched in November.
“We realized there’s a really good niche there,” Boone said, adding that mobile development and data gathering are at the top of many companies’ priorities. “And we like creating new things, so let’s see where else we can take it.”